Bryant-Denny has come a long way since this A-Day snapshot. (The Birmingham News / Mark Almond)

To put things in perspective — as a history buff like Nick Saban would appreciate — you have to go back to Nov. 17, 2007.

You have to go back to Louisiana-Monroe.

Put aside the historical and hysterical parallels of what that afternoon seemed to mean at the time, and focus on what it means now.

It was the last game Alabama lost in Bryant-Denny Stadium.

Students of Crimson Tide football will quickly note how much the world has changed since that day that was supposed to live in infamy.

That was the old Alabama, not to mention the old Bryant-Denny Stadium.

Three years, 8,932 more seats and $65 million later, it’s not unreasonable to wonder how long it might be until Alabama loses there again.

Saban is getting a statue in August to bronze his place in the school’s history as the latest head coach of a national championship team, but the real monument to Alabama football stands directly behind.

Bryant-Denny stands taller than ever, physically, aesthetically and psychologically, as its latest expansion to 101,070 seats wraps up. The grand re-opening, scheduled for the Sept. 4 opener against San Jose State, will put the best team in the nation in what may be the best digs in the country.

There are larger on-campus stadiums, but not many. While such schools as Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State don’t have to feel threatened by Alabama’s bigger-is-better philosophy, there’s another school closer to home that’s falling farther behind in this football arms race.

Can Auburn keep up without building up its own house?

The gap between Bryant-Denny and Jordan-Hare hasn’t been this large, in Alabama’s favor, since 1969. The next year, Auburn expanded its stadium to make it bigger than Alabama’s.

Both schools expanded more than once in the interim, but from 1970 until 2006, Auburn owned the largest on-campus football stadium in the state.

Clearly, those days are over.

Auburn has made some attractive cosmetic changes to Jordan-Hare in recent years, but the stadium hasn’t undergone a full-blown expansion since the upper deck and luxury suites were added to the east side for the 1987 season.

That’s 23 years and four head coaches ago.

In the last five years alone, Alabama has decked both end zones, adding close to 20,000 more seats. That’s close to 20,000 more voices raining down on opponents and, more importantly, lifting up the home team.

You don’t need the biggest and nicest house on the block to win a championship. If you did, the Duke basketball program wouldn’t have acquired yet another banner to hang in the rafters of the quaint fixer-upper known as Cameron Indoor Stadium.

But a bigger and nicer stadium doesn’t hurt, especially on official recruiting weekends and unofficial visits, and nobody has done more in recent years to make its stadium bigger and nicer than Alabama.

It does seem more in keeping with the personalities of the programs that Bryant-Denny should be larger than Jordan-Hare.

Auburn sells itself as a family. Alabama sells itself as an organization. Auburn is at its best as an underdog, and there’s no better front-runner than Alabama.

But it’s not like Auburn is a mom-and-pop store unwilling or unable to pump money back into the business. The school’s trustees just approved spending $16 million on a 100-yard indoor practice facility.

So Auburn can’t pretend that it’s not participating in this arms race to some degree. At the moment, though, when it comes to conventional weapons, Alabama is more dangerous than ever.